


Continuous Thunder

by malapropism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, First War with Voldemort, Second War with Voldemort, love in the shadow of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 18:36:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9136561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism
Summary: “'It is an unknown secret, yes,' Fleur replied. 'That the entire War is about you, Bill Weasley.'”This is a story of war and love in equal measure. It repeats.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : Brief, non-graphic description of death and violence in the wizarding wars. Melancholic, but ultimately hopeful.
> 
>  **Note:** Some dialogue in this story is taken verbatim from _Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince_.
> 
> The original version of this story was written for the 2016 HP Rare Pair Secret Santa, and can be found [here](http://rarepairsecretsanta.tumblr.com/post/155138345345/continuous-thunder). It is significantly shorter and has far more typos.

“If I had all of the answers,  
and you had the body you wanted:  
Would we love with a legendary fire?”  
\- from [Continuous Thunder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nagin6jzYf8) by Japandroids

 

* * *

 

 

“You know, your father and I had been married four years when we were your age. You were already chattering away, and we’d just had Charlie.” 

“Mum, we’ve talked about this, just because you and Dad got married at eighteen, it doesn’t mean that’s normal. Doesn't mean I have to.” 

Molly eyed her eldest son across the kitchen table. Carrot shards floated overhead, neatly julienning themselves matchstick-thin before marching toward a simmering skillet.

“Of course not, dear,” she said, flicking her wand upward. A fat red onion began to unwind itself in mid-air. “It was an entirely different time, you know. There was a war on.”

 

Just outside the little town of Ottery St Catchpole, Molly and Arthur Weasley made their home in what had once been a pigpen, stone-built and long disused. It had been an unusually wet November; the old waterproofing charms on the yellow-thatched roof had given way twice. Storm after storm blew in from the west, soaking the countryside in perpetual gloom. Dark shadows flickered over the fields of Devon.

A few Muggle families lived in the village, seemingly inured to the strangely clad wizarding folk in their midst. Most of the shops were run by Muggles, but there was a wizarding pub called the Hiccuping Hag, which had been enchanted to resemble a long-shuttered purveyor of umbrellas, which all gathered dust in the charmed windows. Those in-the-know could tickle the underside of the doorknob and the cracked green door would swing open to reveal the heart of wizarding social life in the little town. But for the most part, Ottery St Catchpole was a quiet sort of place, without much to offer the newlyweds. Molly had inherited the land as a wedding present from her uncle Ignatius, who had seemingly forgotten that the house which once stood on the property had long since crumbled to dust. It seemed as good a place as any to settle.

In those first years, it all felt a bit like playing house. Cooking charms gone awry, singing the roast and souring the cream. A caterwauling ghoul in the attic who drove them both mad. Arthur Flooing off to the Ministry, dressed in an over-large suit and carrying a battered briefcase mostly for show. During the day, Molly learned to look after the house. She sent packages to Hogwarts for her brothers and kept up with her own school friends. She mucked about in the garden and looked out over the wide empty landscape. She was seventeen when they married, and nineteen when she got pregnant for the first time. Barely twenty when she had their first son. In those early years, she was often alone; after the children came, she’d scarcely know the meaning of the word.

Arthur returned in the evenings and kissed her on the cheek. They cooked together in those days. On the weekends, they hiked up Stoatshead Hill and picnicked under the bright blue sky. Some Fridays, Molly Flooed to London and they went dancing at the Leprechaun’s Lounge, a wizarding discothèque in Diagon Alley. The summer after they were married, they traveled to Vienna to visit Arthur’s brother Boris, a confirmed bachelor ten years their senior who translated English magical theory into German. (Corbin, the eldest of the Weasley brothers, had died unexpectedly of dragon pox when he was only nine.)

Arthur brought her flowers on Tuesdays, bright yellow tormentils and Muggle roses and Flitterbloom cuttings she transferred into their growing garden. They were young and in love, but beyond the walls of their little house, the world was changing.

The year was 1970 and the War had just begun. That February, eleven Muggles had died along the south bank of the Humber near South Ferriby under circumstances deemed “mysterious” by the local paper. Their deaths were not mentioned in the Daily Prophet, of course, but some of the details reached a cadre of witches and wizards tracking the rise of a reactionary separatist group called the Knights of Walpurgis, who had been linked to various suspicious Muggle deaths in the latter half of the previous decade. Certain patterns began to crystallize.

(Years later, a famous scholar of the War would call the deaths on the Humber “the opening salvo of the First Wizarding War, an antecedent of the overt and organised hostility for which the Death Eater movement would eventually be known.” Unlike the mysterious Muggle deaths of the 1960s, the Humber attack had been meticulously planned; it was no cruelty of opportunity, no pureblood lark. While it would be several years before the Knights of Walpurgis refashioned themselves as the Death Eaters, and nearly five before that very name was known in all British wizarding households, the Humber deaths would eventually be understood as the first organized mass execution of Muggles at the behest of Lord Voldemort.)

Word of the attack reached Millicent Bagnold in London, where she was then the Upper Chief Investigative Witch for the Auror’s Office. She immediately owled Albus Dumbledore with a clipping from the Muggle newspaper which first reported on the deaths at the Humber. In turn, Dumbledore sent the clipping to Elphias Doge, his long-time friend and the future co-founding member of what would be called the Order of the Phoenix. Silver ink scrawled across the still photographs of the bodies on the estuary: _They rise - so must we._

The Order would not be formed until the last years of the War, during their darkest hours. In the first half of the decade, Dumbledore and Doge appealed to the organized wizarding community, lobbying the Wizengamot and upper-level Ministry officials to publicly acknowledge the mounting Muggle death toll; they were largely unsuccessful. Alastor Moody, the famed eccentric Auror, was one of their earliest and most vocal supporters; in some regards, this did not help their case. Millicent Bagnold was nearly fired for pressing her higher-ups on the Muggle deaths. She would of course go on to become the Minister for Magic, presiding over the last year of the first War and much of the interwar period. 

The Prophet never mentioned the Knights of Walpurgis in print, although they did report on the murder of a prominent Muggleborn wizard at his home in Holland Park the following July. Ignoring the multiple accounts of the Knights’ involvement – including Mundungus Fletcher’s eyewitness testimony that he’d heard a self-described Knight mouthing off about it at a pub on Knockturn Alley – they hewed to the official line from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement: he had been killed by a faulty home security curse, which likely rebounded after an attempted Muggle break-in. The death merited a scant inch of column on the fourth page of that day’s paper.

(Finally forced to acknowledge the War in 1976, the Prophet printed a full-page retraction of twelve stories printed in the previous seven years, correctly reporting the deaths of nine Muggleborn wizards and witches, along with thirty-two Muggles, for the very first time. At the bottom of the page, they issued a blanket apology for the many deaths and attacks which went entirely unreported during the first years of the War. There was some effort in 1982 to establish a Truth and Reconciliaiton Committee, the primary goals of which would be to 1) illuminate the collusion between the Ministry and the Prophet which led to the suppression of information on the War from the wizarding public, 2) specifically investigate both Eugenia Jenkins and Harold Minchum, who had served as Minister for Magic during the War, with attention toward their failure to disclose key information about the threat posed by Voldemort to the Muggle prime minister, and 3) conduct a national survey of the wizarding population to determine an official death toll. Millicent Bagnold, newly established as the Minister for Magic, expressed private sympathy for the cause but publically decried it as a divisive reminder of the damage done by the Death Eaters. “It is not the time to dwell on the pain of the past decade,” she said in her much-heralded May 17th speech. “It is not the time to cast blame upon our fellow wizardkind. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has fallen and the leaders of his violent regime have been imprisoned. There can be no turning back. We must go forward, together. Together, we will rebuild our communities and reestablish security in the wizarding world. We are only strong so long as we are united.” Consequently, there would be no comprehensive count of the first War’s fatalities until a grassroots oral history campaign was launched in the year 2020 as an effort to capture a fuller picture of the first War before the primary actors were too old or dead to remember.)

At the end of 1972, nearly two years after the Humber attack, Dumbledore convened the first organizing meeting of what would become the Order of the Phoenix. It was a small group, composed primarily of Dumbledore’s own peers, save two young men with bright red hair. The Prewett twins had left Hogwarts earlier that year, and while they had each taken top marks in their N.E.W.T.’s, they forewent traditional careers to join up with Dumbledore’s resistance. (They would, of course, be killed in the last year of the War. It would take five Death Eaters to bring them down.)

Their older sister and her husband were not present at that meeting, and in fact, they would not join the Order in any official capacity during the first War. But Dumbledore remembered Arthur’s outspoken sympathy for (and interest in) Muggles at Hogwarts, where he had taken top marks in the Muggle Studies N.E.W.T., the first student in half a century to do so. (The Muggle Studies curriculum was woefully under-enrolled until the early 2000s; Arthur was in fact the only N.E.W.T. student in his year.) When Dumbledore began to establish safehouses across the country to serve as way-stations for Muggleborn witches and wizards forced to flee the country, he called upon the Burrow. Molly, pregnant for the fourth time, did not hesitate to offer up their home. The family of Caradoc Dearborn, a Muggleborn wizard who fought with the Order, hid with the Weasleys for seven months in 1978. Caradoc had gone missing and the Department of Magical Law Enforcement would not allow the family to leave the country while Hit Wizards searched for their son. Whenever a suspected member of the Order was rumored to be missing, the DMLE put out a Floo-ban on their family and dispatched Hit Wizards to “recover” the missing witch or wizard. While the DMLE’s attempts at intelligence-gathering were largely ineffectual, they occasionally stumbled on good intel.

(This was common practice until the last years of the War. Throughout the War, the DMLE remained deeply suspicious of Dumbledore’s militant resistance group, but they knew very little about the Order of the Phoenix beyond its existence. There was in fact an investigative subgroup of the DMLE tasked solely with reporting on the Order; Sirius Black and James Potter took particular glee in counter-surveillance efforts, intended to confound and consternate the witches and wizards who, in Sirius’ words, “were pottering about while there’s a fucking war on, trying to figure out the make of our knickers.” James objected to the verb choice but agreed fervently with the sentiment; he was known to quite viciously hex particularly nosy DMLE investigators on sight.)

Upon learning of the Floo-ban, the Order sent the Dearborns into hiding with the Weasleys; this was as much to insulate them from the DMLE as it was to protect them from Caradoc himself, should he return under the influence of the Imperius Curse. As both the DMLE’s and the Order’s own efforts to locate Caradoc foundered, he was presumed dead. Before the family fled to Canada, his sister Ceridwen – a Muggle girl who had trained as a midwife, helped to deliver Fred and George. Caradoc’s body was never found.

So the War unfolded.

But in the winter of 1970, it had only just begun. Arthur read about the Humber attack in the North Devon Journal, a Muggle newspaper he found immensely entertaining (if often befuddling). The deaths had been so unusual as to inspire coverage across the country, and several of Arthur's Yorkshire-based colleagues at the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office traded rumors about the killings. “My friend Lucy happened by there after their Pol-ice found the bodies,” a young witch said conspiratorially. “Said she felt a curse, down deep in the earth. Something’s not right there, she said. Not like a common Muggle murder, she said.”

As it was not yet widely known that the Muggles at the Humber had been killed by wizards, Arthur forgot about the affair soon enough. But as more and more reports came in of strange deaths and green shadows on the sky, he would remember the story of eleven bodies at the estuary, laid spread-eagled on the dirt, as if they had fallen from some immense height.

This is the world that awaited Bill Weasley on the 29th of November. Danger hung on the horizon like a hangman’s rope. The year of his birth – the year the War began in earnest – saw many deaths and foretold countless more. But that morning, for the first time in seventeen days, the storm broke and the sun shone bright and a boy was born.

 

* * *

 

 

She saw him first.

He curved into the wind. Feather-fine red hair marked him as a Weasley, but that distinction made no difference to Fleur. She studied him at a distance and found him very handsome, if a little pale. She liked the way he stood next to his mother, a steady hand at her back. There was a deep love in that small gesture.

He looked up, as if sensing her gaze. Their eyes met across the green. He grinned. For a moment, she forgot what lay ahead - the final task, the looming maze, the watchful crowd - and considered only this curious man, who smiled at her plainly, openly. Un-beguiled.

He was twenty-four. She was eighteen. They did not know it yet, but the War would begin anew that day. By luck or fate or some other unknown force, they were there when it happened, when Voldemort returned. And so Bill, the boy born alongside the War, fell in love at its return.

Years later, he will say that it was love at first sight and she will chide him for it. “We have something much better,” she will say. “As soon as we saw each other, we knew each other. This is much better than love - it is understanding. You saw me and unlike most boys you did not just see my beauty or my blood. Me, that is who you saw.”

He will laugh at this, as he always does, and he will look at her with clear eyes. “Call it what you like. I call it love.”

 

“We only ask because we love you,” Molly said. “We want you to be happy. You need a bit of stability, especially if you keep insisting on running off to Merlin-knows-where…”

Irritation flushed Bill’s skin: this, again. His mother sat across the kitchen table from him and flicked her wand at a mound of soft white dough, coaxing it into lattice tendrils. It seemed they were always at the kitchen table, when they had this conversation. His father had car parts in his lap and grease slick on his fingertips, and he did his best to avoid both their eyes.

“It’s only Egypt, Mum. I’m a Floo away.”

“But you must be lonely, and I don’t know how you could possibly feel at home there, so far away from everything you’ve ever known.”

“I like it there. I have work, and friends - “

“But no one special.”

“ - and I date, I’m not a hermit.”

“You date! A few weeks here, a few months there. I’m talking about a relationship, where you find a nice girl and really make something together - “

“Or a nice boy,” Arthur added absent-mindedly, fiddling with his spark plug.

“Yes, of course,” Molly said quickly. “We know that you have - broader interests. And we just want you to be happy. We’re not choosy.”

“Well, maybe I am,” Bill said, his voice rising. He pushed his chair away from the table and it scratched along the floor, a keen whine that reverberated. “There are thousands and thousands of people out there. What are the odds that the person I’m supposed to be with forever was in my year at Hogwarts, or in my division at Gringotts, or in the shop when I’m out getting biscuits? And how should I be expected to find them by the time I’m twenty? You act like - like it’s supposed to work out for us just like it did for you. Meet at school, get married at eighteen, together forever, a perfect match. But that’s not the rule, it’s the exception - it’s got to be - I’m barely twenty-two. There’s a whole world out there to see. I’ve got time yet. If I even want to get married, because I don’t have to, you know. It’s not the only way to be happy. And I don’t want to keep having this out. I know you only mean well but I’m tired of it. I’m going home.” 

That last syllable stung Molly, although she hid it as best she could. Bill walked out into the garden and Disapparated with a snap, back to London where he’d take an international Floo to Cairo.

Of course, they would have this conversation again and again; Molly could not help but bring it up and Arthur could not bring himself to stop it and Bill could not be faulted for taking the bait. Such is the nature of family, of love: to pick at each other incessantly and to call it a generosity.

 

Bill loved generously. It was his nature, to love and be loved, and it came easily.

Most things came easily to Bill, of course. He navigated the world with a grace particular to those who have not yet known ungainly loss. First prefect, and then Head Boy, only saved from a Quidditch captaincy by his brother Charlie, who was undeniably the better flyer. Despite all his accumulating accolades, his O.W.L.s and his N.E.W.T.s and his professors’ admiration, he found it easy enough to make friends who only teased him good-naturedly for his golden status.

He was the object of many a school crush, and he returned quite a few in kind. He had his first kiss at fourteen (Aeron, in the common room late one evening) and his first girlfriend at fifteen (Maeve, a Ravenclaw with a wide grin and a constellation of freckles). In the sixth year, he began to wear his hair long. He dated a Muggleborn boy called Richard whose father owned a garage in Leeds. He grew six inches and starting going out with Adina, who could fly laps around him on the Quidditch pitch. On a weekend trip to Hogsmeade, a local girl called Elizabeth asked him out for a drink, and they dated for most of his seventh year. He was kind; he was loved.

But he was also young, and so these relationships flared briefly, brightly. Nothing lasted. He danced at the weddings of his friends. His mother nagged at him to settle, settle.

In Egypt, he dated an American Curse-Breaker from the wizarding bank in Boston, but they parted ways when she returned stateside. He nursed a crush on Amin, one of Gringotts’ translators; they kissed once, at New Years. There were others. He fell gently in and out of love.

In time, the work began to grate on him. He’d joined up right out of school, and curse-breaking had seemed like the perfect fit: adventure, a bit of danger, intricate spellwork, far-flung locales. His team was based at Alexandria, and the history of it dazzled. But as the years wore on, he began to feel uneasy about their expeditions. A coworker likened it to government-sanctioned graverobbing and quit in protest; Bill felt a twinge of envy as they went. (The Weasley in him, ever-remembering the sting of an empty vault, balked at walking out on a good-paying job; he wrestled with this.)

The local authorities tolerated their presence - so goes the exchange of gold and power - but in the city, the Curse-Breakers were regarded as interlopers, carrion-bird Brits who had come to plunder. Eventually, he could no longer take it, and just after the new year, he applied for a transfer back to London.

Meanwhile, his mother fretted. She looked at him and saw the march of time; she was just twenty when he was born. He was twenty now, then twenty-two, nearly twenty-five. To her eye, he is perennially restless, rootless.

“We just want you to be happy,” she said as they prepared to travel to Hogwarts for the final task of the Triwizard Tournament. 

“I am,” he replied, and for the most part, he meant it.

 

* * *

 

After the War, Bill and Fleur returned to the little cottage outside Tinworth. They were, for the first time in many months, alone with each other. They threw open the windows and reminisced, retelling their own mythology in the way that all lovers do when they are alone. 

“I did not like you at first,” Fleur said. “You were very English.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say about the love of your life,” Bill replied with a grin.

Outside, gulls cried and the sea rolled onto the shore. And so life continues on, as they begin to learn the feel of peace. 

 

“Would you like to go for a drink after work?”

It was the summer of 1995. Fleur had come back to London to work as a translator for Gringotts, where Bill had joined the in-house Curse-Breaking team. Deep beneath the earth’s surface, he kept office in a repurposed vault that had been fortified against spell damage. There, he could lose himself in the work, the knotty unraveling of centuries’ old spells on parchment.

In the afternoons, he emerged from the subterranean levels with a crick in his neck and an unthinking smile on his lips. His path always took him past the translator cubicles, where the high-ceilinged room reverberated with the hum of a dozen different languages as the translators dictated their work to specially charmed quills. Fleur’s cubicle faced a moss-covered stone wall; there were no charmed windows for Gringotts.

He hovered at her desk, feeling entirely unwieldy for the first time in his life. That question and its invitation had fallen off his tongue without a second thought and now he was not sure where to put his limbs.

Fleur looked up from her work - a sheet of black linen paper, embossed with curling French script - and regarded him carefully before replying.

“Yes. I am almost finished with this. But not that horrible leaking pub - we will go elsewhere.”

“Sure,” Bill said, at once relieved of his anxiety and newly seized by it . “We can go wherever you like.”

Her mouth curved into the faintest smile.

 

They were married on the first of August. That day, the Ministry fell. Death Eaters stormed the Burrow, interrogating those remaining guests and idly blasting their wedding garlands out of the sky.

Afterward, Bill tried to make light of it. “I half-expect Voldemort to show up for our firstborn,” he said. “He seems hellbent on ruining every important day of my life.” 

“It is an unknown secret, yes,” Fleur replied. “That the entire War is about you, Bill Weasley.”

They laughed, a little.

  

The War marked them for its own. They could not help but be changed by it in ways innumerable.

Fleur had never planned to stay in dreary England after that summer at Gringotts. France was her home, and she had always intended to return. But during the War, she spilt blood on this soil and somehow, it became _hers._ She fought for it; she would not give up her claim. So, they stayed.

The War let Bill’s blood, too. The werewolf called Greyback sank his teeth into Bill’s flesh and clawed open his skin and so he was marked, thus changed. After the Battle of the Astronomy Tower, he lay unconscious in the Hospital Wing, angry unhealing scars carving up the planes of his face into something unfamiliar and discordant. Fleur sat at his side, her hands in her lap, unspeaking. The other Weasleys watched her carefully.

Molly cried at Bill’s side, taking his hand in her own. “Of course, it doesn’t matter how he looks…It’s not r-really important…but he was a very handsome little b-boy…always very handsome…and he was g-going to be married!”

“And what do you mean by that? What do you mean, he was _going_ to be married?” Fleur said sharply, looking up from her silent, stunned vigil. “You think Bill will not wish to marry me anymore? You think, because of these bites, he will not love me?”

Molly looked entirely startled by this interjection, as if she had somehow forgotten that Bill’s betrothed was even in the room.

“Because he will!” Fleur continued. “It would take more than a werewolf to stop Bill loving me!”

“Well, yes, I’m sure,” Molly said slowly, “but I thought perhaps - given how - how he - “

She stuttered into an uneasy silence. They had circled around to the truth of the matter, and Fleur seemed aflame at the very suggestion. “You thought I would not wish to marry him? Or perhaps, you hoped? What do I care how he looks? I am good-looking enough for both of us, I think! All these scars show is that my husband is brave.”

Silence strained and the two women stood at odds, each bruised and bloodied and embittered. And then suddenly, they were in each other’s arms, weeping. Love in the shadow of war: it makes for unlikely allies.

 

During the War, there was little time for doubt. Of course, it crept in, winding its way ‘round their throats like common ivy. But they razed it, cut it down and burnt it away, because what else could they do? They could not afford to stand still - to question - to doubt. There was work to be done. 

But when the War was done and the dead were buried, suddenly there was nothing but time. Great stretches of it, unhurried by threat of death or force of fight. And so when Bill and Fleur returned to Shell Cottage, they had more time than they might’ve liked to figure out what it meant to love without war.

To live without war. Bill had never known such peace, not truly. Unlike his brothers, he had been old enough during the first War to know that it was an unending thing, that their victory had been one of absention, that peace was a fragile thing.

The second War has been won and the survivors have gone home, but he still catches himself holding his breath. Voldemort is dead but there will be another foe, another fight. It is always so. He finds himself waking up in the middle of the night, his fingers tight around his wand and a curse ready on his lips.

(Fleur kisses him on the cheek, and promises: “We are safe. It is over.” Some nights, she even believes it.)

She walks the lonely beach at dawn, even as the summer falls into autumn and winter’s chill set in. Bill joins her at the surf’s edge and they talk of living things: the birds which dive below the watery surface in search of their prey, the crabs which scuttle along the sand, the fish which flicker underfoot. Sometimes, they did not speak at all. They don’t need to; they have always had that understanding, which runs like a current between them, steady as the tide.

 

Bill looks in the mirror and an unfamiliar face gazes back, stitched together like so much piecemeal. His curse: those jagged pink lines burnt across his skin, an itchy rash that breaks out at silver’s touch, a penchant for raw steak and a dull hollow ring in his ears at the full moon’s rise. He is lucky; he knows it, and he feels a kind of guilt for it. He thinks often of Lupin.

Fleur looks at Bill and does not see the man who stood with a hand at his mother’s back on the day the War began again. But she sees the man she fell in love with: bright, brilliant Bill, who loved generously, who looked across the green on a cool day in June and saw her with clear eyes. Now, she knows that it is her turn to look back and to make him feel seen, known.

He doubts. Everything had come easily to Bill until suddenly, it did not. He traces the scars with his fingertips and for the first time, it is not easy to inhabit this skin. Uncertainties keep him up at night: does she really love me - how could she really love me - if she could have anyone - she deserves more - I deserve less. She can feel that doubt on his skin and in his spine and she holds him close but she cannot take it away. If she tried it might strangle them both.

So they struggle to keep the darkness at bay. Some days, it nips at their ankles like a rabid dog. Some days, it sings a siren song. 

Fleur was born knowing what Bill comes to learn: your visage is a lie. It charms; it enchants. It attracts and it repels, but mostly, it obscures. Fleur, who had been made an object of beauty by the eyes of others, knows that beauty had little intrinsic value. It is; it isn’t. Neither its presence nor its absence make much of a difference to Fleur.

Bill presses his questions to the roof of his mouth and swallows them whole. If there are answers to be had, neither he nor Fleur have them. There will always be doubt: that is the nature of love, of living.

We all carry doubt within ourselves. But sometimes, the stars align and you meet a person who carries some of those selfsame doubts – dark wriggling things that you each hide deep within, all your fears and your uncertainties – and you recognize each other. You see each other. You understand each other.

Of course, you each have doubts of your own – shadows untouched by light, particular to your own pain – but when you are together, a weight lifts. It is like spun thread: one single strand is easy enough to snap, but if you wind them together, they are stronger for it. Together, you can bear the weight.

Doubt is not such a bad thing. Love forged in war may be all the stronger for it. If there was nothing left to doubt, would that love still carry its own weight, would it still be so great?

And yet: a love turned brittle by doubt will crumble. There are no such easy platitudes – there are no such given certainties. They have doubt, and they have hope, and they have love. It will not come easily, and it may not last forever. But they will try.

 

(On the 2nd of May, precisely two years after the Battle of Hogwarts, Fleur gives birth to their first child. Bill holds the tiny infant in his arms, a baby girl with a shock of blonde hair, and laughs: “Always knew the bastard would try and make it to my firstborn.”

A small smile on her lips, Fleur says, “But he did not. He is dead and we are here.”

“And so is she,” Bill says, returning the smile. “Now what should we call her?”

Fleur regards the pair of them carefully before replying, “Victoire, of course.”)

  

And so, the story begins anew:

Just outside the little town of Tinworth, Bill and Fleur Weasley make their home in a shell-studded cottage on the coast of Cornwall. They wake with salt in their hair and the sea in their ears.

Bill takes up cooking the Muggle way, and grows herbs in tiny blue pots on the windowsill. Fleur swims in the sea every morning, and her sister visits in the spring. She and Bill go to the Burrow for dinner on Sundays. First, they are joined by Victoire, and then Dominique, and then Louis. The cottage rings with childish laughter. 

Peace endures. The wind whistles through a loose glass pane in the old peaked windows, and one day, it does not sound like a warning cry. The scars on Bill’s face never fade but they turn the color of the moon; in his mind’s eye, he is ever as he was, but the mirror no longer pains. In the first year after the War, Fleur’s hair turns entirely white, all that silvery blonde leeching away. She cries about it just once, when her mother comes to visit for her twenty-second birthday.

Some days are better than others.

There is a wild beauty to the land. The roar of the ocean lulls their children to sleep; when they go to Hogwarts, they will miss its steadying rhythm. Storms blacken the sky every July and they set up enchanted lightning rods on the twin chimneys. Once the storm goes back out to sea, they hunt for storm-glass on the beach; their treasures line the cottage windows.

In the summer, there is continuous thunder.


End file.
